Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. Lying there gurgling and inert with a fluttery-eyed smile. One shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Gately looks less built than poured, the smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size wasn’t one of the major factors in a male alumni getting offered the male live-in Staff job here, but there you go. Don G. has a massive square head made squarer-looking by the Prince Valiantish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save $: room and board aside — plus the opportunity for Service — he makes very little as an Ennet House Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district courts. He has the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who’s holding himself just over the level of doze. Pat Montesian is due in at 0900 and Don G. can’t go to bed until she arrives because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court appearance downtown and he’s the only Staffer here. Foltz, the female live-in Staffer, is at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Hartford for the long Interdependence Day weekend. Gately personally is not hot on NA: so many relapses and un-humble returns, so many war stories told with nondisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service or serious Message; all these people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don’t miss the Substance. Rampant newcomer-fucking. There’s a difference between abstinence v. recovery, Gately knows. Except of course who’s Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems like it works for him today: AA’s tough Enfield-Brighton love, the White Flag Group, old guys with suspendered bellies and white crew cuts and geologic amounts of sober time, the Crocodiles, that’ll take your big square head off if they sense you’re getting complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance every fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can’t sit and have to pace at the meeting’s rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten teachers in polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake cookies for the weekly meeting and relate from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for just two more fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning’s needled light. Gately, albeit an oral narcotics man from way back, has committed himself to AA. He drank his fair share, too, he figures, after all.
Exec. Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2F and 1M, who better be showing up soon, and Gately will answer the door when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll get them aside and tip them off to be sure to pet Pat M.’s dogs during the interview. They’ll be sprawled all over the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He’ll tell them it’s a proved fact that if Pat’s dogs like you, you’re in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell appliers this, and then if the appliers do actually pet the dogs — two hideous white golden retrievers with suppurating scabs and skin afflictions, plus one has Grand Mall epilepsy — it’ll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding.
A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. Animals here come and go. Alumni adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend to remain. Gately’s intestines moan. Boston’s dawn coming back on the Green Line this morning was chemically pink, trails of industrial exhaust blowing due north. The nail-parings in the ashtray on the floor are, he realizes now, too big to be from fingernails. These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. He swallows hard. He’d tell Geoffrey Day how, even if they are just cliches, cliches are (a) soothing, and (b) remind you of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence; and (4) silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease. Gene M. says you can spell the Disease DIS-EASE, which sums the basic situation up nicely. Pat has a meeting at the Division of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about. She can’t read her own handwriting, which the stroke affected her handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who’s biting their fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail-bits in the ashtray at like 0500. Plus House regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs. There’s a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the almost exact shape of Florida. Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is glib and a teacher at a Scholarly Journal’s helm. This threatens the self-concept of a Randy Lenz that thinks of himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-intellectual. Small-time dealers never conceptualize themselves as just small-time dealers, kind of like whores never do. For Occupation on his Intake form Lenz had put free lance script writer. And he makes a show of that he reads. For the first week here in July he’d held the books upside-down in the northeast corner of whatever room. He had a gigantic Medical Dictionary he’d haul down and smoke and read until Annie Parrot the Asst. Manager had to tell him not to bring it down anymore because it was fucking with Morris Hanley’s mind. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just sat there and read. Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., also, you can telclass="underline" there’s a certain way they don’t quite look at each other. And so now of course they’re mashed together in the 3-Man together, since three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between them and refused Urines and got bounced on the spot, and so Day gets moved up in his first week from the 5-Man room to the 3-Man. Seniority comes quick around here. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Burt F.S.’s still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind him pounding him on the back so that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he’s waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder to try and signal her to quit. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing: Day’ll try to goad Lenz into a beef that’ll be public enough so he doesn’t get hurt but does get bounced, and then he can leave treatment and go back to Chianti and ‘Ludes and getting assaulted by sidewalks and make out like the relapse is Ennet House’s fault and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Day is like a wide-open interactive textbook on the Disease. One of Gately’s jobs is to keep an eye on what’s possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the Manager know and try to smooth things down in advance if possible. The ceiling’s color could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen; here everybody has to make their little comment.